Anyone can fork it and do what they want, people respect Linus and follow suit because he’s good at what he does and knows it best. He holds no power or authority beyond the willful respect and acknowledgement of the people.
I edited articles as a teenager in the early 00s when most people still used brittanica and Encarta. The quality was probably really bad, but the articles didn’t yet exist or only had a stump.
But the articles now have a much higher quality, with good sources and a very consistent style. If an article doesn’t exist today, it was purposefully removed because it did not meet the criteria to have a wiki page.
Obviously, such a thing becomes more of a dedicated hobby and not something a few amateurs do on a whim.
Similar things happened to YouTube videos, or historically, to things like singing, story telling, quilting, etc.
As something becomes more popular, the pool of participants grows and the selection becomes more difficult.
It’s been my experience that the devout cherry-pick from the bible to find material that supports their personal world view. Since the bible is constantly contradicting itself, this is wholly possible.
Happy Birthday, Pop Goes the Weasel, Auld Lang Syne, Here Comes the Bride are obviously here to stay. Lots of Christmas music has potential as well: Jingle Bells, and POSSIBLY Feliz Navidad by José Feliciano, as well as All I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey.
But I also think Barbie Girl by Aqua has a decent chance of being practically universal. In that vein, maybe the Hampster Dance too, but idk. Dragostea Din Tei?
I think the real answer though is that most of the popular songs are probably ones that are connected to specific uses outside of the song itself. Pop Goes the Weasel is used in like, every pop-goes-the-weasel type toy, and even in movies when something scary is about to pop out at you. Happy Birthday is literally sung at every birthday. (That reminds me of For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow as well.) Auld Lang Syne is a popular New Years song across the world at this point. Here Comes the Bride at every wedding, etc. Maybe National Anthems will also hold the test of time, depending on if the nation lasts long enough and doesn’t change its anthem.
The point is, if it’s a practical and traditional tune it’s more likely to last, I think.
Oh. I forgot Reveille which is the military wake-up call bugle song lmao
I think more people would be familiar with “Call to Post,” than “Reveille.” Dunno. I guess it depends on how many scouts and military members there are vs horse racing fans.
I don’t think that one outlasts the next couple decades. Yeah, it’s fun and the lyrics are weird, but Romanian isn’t all that widely spoken, so the vast majority of the world population cannot sing it.
IDK, i was obsessed with that song as a teenager and learned to enunciate the whole song without knowing what it said. but, i have 99 Luftballons on my personal playlist so maybe i just like catchy foreign songs lol
Oh, I totally get it, I loved it too. I just don’t think it will stick in quite the same way when people don’t have lyrics to attach to the song. Like, I can’t play it at karaoke night.
Honesty that’d probably be better. Ham is so bland on pizza; it can’t compete with the sauce. I always do pineapple and pepperoni. The spice from the pepperoni cuts through the sweetness really nicely.
Yeah, there’s this weird agism I’ve seen. Maybe they think the ‘young people’ (30 years in this case) are bragging? I just view it as someone adding their context, nothing abhorrent ¯*(ツ)*/¯
Yeah I meant it not as bragging but as acknowledgement of the reality that for many of us it is so far into the only internet we’ve ever known that as a cultural touchstone it’s lost on us, even those of us in the fediverse/linux sphere.
Young or old, in our society age isn’t an achievement or something one should brag about. But it’s important to keep in mind the wide array of ages present here. Some here lament the death of forum culture, others caught the tail end of it, and still others will need the explanation of why it’s worth missing (and yeah I’m not that young, but I know professionals who are)
The eternal September is to some of us full adults, people complaining about our parents being on the internet for as long as we’ve been alive, which is actually something we can agree to complain about, but people that age are also here
And also it feels like while there’s just the one eternal September there’s also several. I’ve been part of some and I’ve been frustrated with others, and for some I showed up in December and didn’t realize what I’d missed
Having lived through it, it really does feel weird though. I (mostly) missed the gasoline crisis (I was a child). It's hard to imagine gas pumps all over the US being out of gasoline, and mile long lines waiting for a tanker to show up so you could get gas. It's pretty much impossible to imagine staple rationing (butter, sugar) during wartime in modern US. I certainly didn't live through it - having the TP aisle empty during covid doesn't quite match that. And the actual (1930s) depression. I suspect those folks would consider the crashes of 87 99 01 08 and 20 minor annoyances - a bad Tuesday - compared to what they lived through.
Think of this, though - you have Covid. Okay we have Covid. That's a world-wide event with life-changing implications for so many. And, we can hope, we don't get another pandemic event of that magnitude in our lifetimes. And a decade or two from now you can lord it over some kid who was born in the last 3 years and just "doesn't understand" that "closing school for three days because the flu is so bad" is not a pandemic, and that they just don't understand what a game changer Covid was. ;-)
One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. “Give me five bees for a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was, that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones.
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